Rogue Primate: An Exploration of Human Domestication

This thoughtful and provocative book, winner of Canada's prestigious Governor-General's award in 1994, challenges many conventional ideas about the complex and unique relationship between humans and the natural world. According to scholar John Livingston, the first domesticated animal was neither dog nor goat, but man. Humans cut themselves adrift from the natural world by becoming entirely dependent on ideas and technology. He believes we have abandoned our innate "wildness" - our intuitive and instinctual selves - to such an extent that we must depend entirely on our own technology to relate to the natural world. Thus the dependence into which we have grown has made us not merely the servants of our own technology, but one of its products. Livingston's theses also vigorously questions such widely held notions as that of "sustainable development" and the idea of "rights" for animals. . Powerful and uncompromising, Rogue Primate asks the disturbing question of what it really means to be a human living in a non-human world.